George W. Bush’s Code of Silence
In 2015, when Donald Trump descended a golden escalator to announce his campaign for President, he had a clear target: George W. Bush’s younger brother Jeb. Jeb was at the top of the polls. His super PAC had raised more than a hundred million dollars, dwarfing the funds of the ten other declared candidates. Trump’s strategy was to provoke the front-runner. His first video ad excoriated Jeb for his comments on illegal immigration, which the Florida governor once called “an act of love.”
In the months that followed, Trump bulldozed the Bush family and its legacy. He mocked Jeb as “low-energy” and accused him of representing his brother’s failed foreign policy. During the 2016 G.O.P. debate in South Carolina, he went for the kill. The war in Iraq was “a big, fat mistake,” he said. “They lied! They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none.” The audience booed, but Trump wasn’t finished. “The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign,” he told Jeb. “Remember that.”
A week later, Jeb dropped out of the race, ending not just his candidacy but his family’s political dynasty and, effectively, the pre‑Trump Republican Party. As Trump dispatched his remaining challengers and secured the nomination, no one expected the Bushes to endorse him. Though it’s customary for former Presidents to appear at their party’s convention, George H. W. and George W. Bush skipped the coronation in Cleveland. “I don’t like him. . . . I don’t know much about him, but I know he’s a blowhard,” H.W. told the writer Mark K. Updegrove. “And I’m not too excited about him being a leader.” The elder Bush voted for Hillary Clinton, and W. cast his Presidential ballot for “None of the Above.”
In office, Trump delighted in rejecting the Bush brand. “Thousand points of light,” Trump riffed at a 2018 rally in Montana, referencing George H. W. Bush’s signature initiative promoting civic service and voluntarism. “What the hell is that? Has anyone ever figured that one out?” The Bushes believed in diplomacy and international engagement; Trump favored putting “America First.” The Bushes supported open markets and free trade; Trump loved corporatism and tariffs. George W. Bush depicted immigrants, especially Latino immigrants, as contributors to their communities and the country. Trump was a nativist who insulted nonwhite immigrants in vile terms.
There were a few moments in Trump’s first term when George W. Bush reminded people that he existed. In 2017, after Trump defended the white nationalists who rioted in Charlottesville, Bush gave a speech that reasserted his family’s values and implicitly criticized Trump. “Bullying and prejudice in our public life sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and compromises the moral education of children,” he said. “The only way to pass along civic values is to first live up to them.” The next year, the two Presidents saw each other at George H. W. Bush’s funeral, at the National Cathedral. Trump sat scowling with his arms folded as 43 praised 41 in terms that could only be read as criticism of 45. “Of course, Dad taught me another special lesson,” George W. said. “He showed me what it means to be a President who serves with integrity, leads with courage, and acts with love in his heart for the citizens of our country.” It was obvious who he thought didn’t.
Yet as the party he led for eight years was remade by an authoritarian who mocked his family’s values, Bush refrained from uttering Trump’s name or challenging his policies directly. Bush said nothing when Trump blocked Muslims from entering the country, when Trump separated children from their parents at the border, or when Trump was impeached the first time, for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. When Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Bush could muster only an oblique rebuke. He called the January 6th uprising “a sickening and heartbreaking sight,” attributing the violence to the “reckless behavior” and “falsehoods” spread by political leaders, whom he once again did not name. On the twentieth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, in 2021, Bush gave a speech warning about violent extremism at home. Trump, apparently unmoved by the occasion, responded by blasting Bush’s “failed and uninspiring presidency.”
Why has Bush, the only living former Republican President, been absent and invisible? Why the reticence to challenge a man who has repeatedly abused him and his family, who engineered a hostile takeover of what was once their party, and who contemptuously repudiated the values that matter most to him? A week after the 2016 election, Bush hinted at answers to these questions during an event at his Presidential library, in Dallas. “I’m interested in politics, but I don’t think it’s helpful for the country to have a former President criticize successors,” he said. “It’s a hard job to begin with, and I really don’t think it helps to make it any harder.” He has made the same point on other occasions: he prefers to steer clear of political issues “so as not to second‑guess my successors.”
With such comments, Bush is referring to a tradition that former Presidents don’t criticize those who follow them. After leaving office, in 1797, George Washington returned to Mount Vernon and refrained from speaking in public about John Adams. Washington’s refusal to seek a third term and his political aloofness for the remaining two years of his life helped establish healthy norms around American Presidential transitions. A former President’s return to private life gives his successor freedom to govern, prevents cults of personality from forming around ex‑leaders, and underpins the peaceful transfer of power.
But the precept that former Presidents should abstain from politics is a pretty soft one. As President, George W. Bush had a natural fascination with John Quincy Adams, the only other son of a President to be elected to the White House. After leaving that office, the younger Adams served for seventeen years in the House of Representatives, where he advocated against slavery and frequently derided his successors Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, and James K. Polk. Given Bush’s identification with Adams and Trump’s identification with the populist‑nationalist Jackson, the parallel is especially apt. Adams declined to attend Jackson’s Inauguration, in 1829, and was the leading voice of opposition to the Jacksonian spoils system, the policy of Native American removal, and the annexation of Texas.
In the twentieth century, any remaining practice of post‑Presidential reserve mostly fell away. Theodore Roosevelt ran against his own chosen successor, William Howard Taft, as a third‑party candidate, in 1912. Herbert Hoover publicly opposed F.D.R.’s New Deal. Jimmy Carter kept up a more or less running commentary on his successors, including Bill Clinton, whom he accused of “not being truthful” to a grand jury in the Paula Jones case, and George W. Bush, whom he continually denounced. “I have been disappointed in almost everything he has done,” Carter told a Georgia newspaper, of Bush. He described the Iraq War as a “completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements” and, in 2007, said that “as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”
Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all criticized Trump during his first term. Obama accused him of fomenting division and undermining democracy; he called Trump’s COVID‑19 response “an absolute chaotic disaster.” During Trump’s reëlection campaign in 2020, he made it even more personal. “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job, because he can’t,” he said. “This is not a reality show—this is reality.” And, of course, Trump assailed his own successor, Joe Biden, with singular viciousness during the latter’s Presidency.
In other words, the tradition of post‑Presidential restraint isn’t Bush’s reason for not criticizing Trump. It’s his excuse.
So why won’t Bush condemn Trump, really? Friends and advisers, none of whom were willing to speak on the record, cite a constellation of reasons: self‑protection, temperament, and his family. Bush doesn’t want Trump to come after him; it’s like baiting a bear or wrestling with a pig. He’s protective of his family, especially his daughters, who no longer have Secret Service protection to safeguard them from Trump‑inspired fanatics. Nor does he want to undermine the career of his pro‑Trump nephew, George P. Bush, who operates in the MAGA-fied world of Texas politics. One friend says the former President is just lazy and can’t be bothered.
All of those factors contribute. But there’s also something else: Bush has become paralyzed by concern for his historical reputation. He left office in January, 2009, deeply unpopular, amid a global financial crisis, two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He ended his second term with one of the lowest Gallup approval ratings ever recorded for a departing President: thirty-four per cent. (The number for Clinton was sixty-six per cent; for Obama, fifty-nine per cent.) In 2009, the C‑SPAN Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership ranked Bush thirty‑sixth out of forty‑two Presidents. To criticize Trump wouldn’t just make Bush the antagonist in Trump’s war on the old Party establishment. His presence as a political actor would remind people of his humiliating failures, especially the war in Iraq.
Bush has frequently said that he doesn’t waste time worrying about how history might judge him. Perhaps he thinks that he’ll one day be vindicated—honored like his hero, Winston Churchill, who guided a country through war only to suffer a crushing electoral defeat in 1945. After Bush finished his second term, he said he wasn’t going to chase popularity through good works, philanthropy, or political engagement, as some of his predecessors had. Instead, he told the journalist Robert Draper, he planned to “replenish the ol’ coffers” on the corporate speaking circuit and ride his mountain bike on his West Texas ranch.
As usual with Bush, the cavalier persona was part real and part pretense. Since 2009, he has been focussed, as much as or more than any modern ex‑President, on tending to his historical standing. His biggest projects after leaving office were writing a self‑justifying memoir and raising money to set up a web of institutions that would promote his legacy. The George W. Bush Foundation largely funds both the George W. Bush Library and Museum and the George W. Bush Institute. These effectively constitute a single entity, the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which opened, in 2013, on a twenty‑three‑acre plot at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. The center’s implicit goal is to get people to think more favorably about George W. Bush.
The library and museum promote Bush’s legacy through positive framing of his handling of events like the Iraq War and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Exhibitions cover Bush’s greatest actual achievement, the H.I.V./AIDS-relief initiative known as PEPFAR, as well as his post‑9/11 leadership and his No Child Left Behind education-reform effort. The museum also runs public programs that highlight his values and humanitarian priorities, keeping him visible in a nonpartisan context.
The Bush Foundation raised five hundred million dollars to build the library and has raised hundreds of millions more to fund both itself and the Bush Institute, which supports such causes as global health, veterans’ wellness, and the promotion of democracy. Most donations to Presidential libraries don’t have to be publicly disclosed, but some of the Bush Foundation’s patrons are known. Millions came from the Mercer Family Foundation, led by the Trump supporters Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, and from the family network of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Education Secretary in his first term. In other words, Bush depends partly on Trump supporters to bankroll the post‑Presidential infrastructure that is his primary vehicle for repairing his reputation.
Now Bush paints. He tries to paint every day, ideally in the morning, whether he’s at his home, in Dallas; his ranch, in Crawford, Texas; or the Bush family compound, in Kennebunkport, Maine. He took it up as a hobby in 2012, a few years after leaving office. A friend gave him a copy of Churchill’s essay “Painting as a Pastime,” which suggested to him that it might be a good way to fill his days. “I was antsy,” Bush wrote. “I figured that if painting had sated Churchill’s appetite for learning, I might benefit from it as well.”
Unlike Churchill, who mostly painted soothing landscapes, Bush’s subjects are largely political. His first project was to make paintings of world leaders he’d known when he was in office. He exhibited thirty of these portraits at his Presidential library in 2014. They were made quickly, painted from official photographs, which gives them the flattened, sometimes unsettling appearance of outsider art. Brightly colored and Expressionist in style, they fail to express much. The viewer recognizes the familiar faces of Tony Blair, Jiang Zemin, Angela Merkel, and Silvio Berlusconi, but there’s little sense that the artist has a personal relationship with them, or that he is trying to convey anything about who they are. When he made them, Bush wasn’t a very good painter.
Something changed, however, when Bush turned his brush to wounded veterans. This series was exhibited in 2017 at the Bush Library and published in book form as “Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors.” Unlike Bush’s first exhibition, in which all the subjects were famous, none of the ninety-eight people portrayed—including thirty‑five in a huge, four‑panel mural—were public figures. These were people recovering from grievous injuries, whom Bush invited to join him on mountain-bike rides and golf outings sponsored by the Bush Institute. Many were missing limbs or had horrific burns or brain injuries. Others suffered from post‑traumatic stress and wore their pain on their faces.
Although Bush was still painting from photographs, his technique had become more confident, with passages of discordant color and thick impasto. He had been practicing steadily and studying the paintings of Lucian Freud. Unlike his previous work, these new portraits had genuine emotional content, conveying suffering and dignity. But what, many viewers wondered, was Bush trying to express by examining the people profoundly damaged by the wars that defined his Presidency?
In interviews, Bush said the paintings were simply a way of expressing his gratitude for the sacrifice of these veterans. That doesn’t account, however, for the written profile he attached to each picture. While these vignettes don’t stint in describing the subjects’ catastrophic injuries, nearly all of them resolve into uplifting endings and inspirational messages. The veterans in the paintings are now playing eighteen holes of golf with their prosthetic limbs, cycling a hundred kilometres, dancing, and holding their children. They have defeated addiction, alcoholism, and despair, turning their lives around by finding God, just as Bush did in the mid‑eighties. Many of the subjects tell him that the crucible of injury and recovery gave them a sense of purpose, making them happier and more successful than when they were physically intact. More than anything else, the portraits seem meant as a kind of mitigation. Bush informs us that despite what they suffered in the war—a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens, destabilized the Middle East, spurred the rise of ISIS, increased Iran’s power, broke the national budget, intensified the polarization of American politics, and contributed to Trump’s ascent—America’s wounded veterans are doing really well. Diminishing the harm done to them extenuates the defining failure of his Presidency.
Bush’s next subject was another failure of his Presidency: immigration, where Congress had blocked his attempts at comprehensive reform. This project, published in book form as “Out of Many, One,” in 2021, comprises work he was making in his studio during Trump’s first term. The paintings’ subjects include famous immigrants such as Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the basketball star Dirk Nowitzki, as well as survivors of the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia, refugees from North Korea and Afghanistan, and people who came from Mexico without proper documentation. The first painting in the book is a closeup of the face of the Statue of Liberty, accompanied by Emma Lazarus’s paean to immigration, “The New Colossus.”
The paintings, in other words, are love letters to immigration, as the text that goes with them explains. America’s immigrants, in Bush’s simplistic depiction, are hardworking, humble, and resilient, the opposite of Trump’s caricature. Many share Bush’s Christian faith. They forgive their persecutors and offer thanks to the United States, where they are patriotic citizens. Lest anyone miss the point, the book concludes with a policy statement from the George W. Bush Institute: “Why We Need Immigration (and Reform).” It argues for restoring the Special Immigrant Visa program and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which gave legal status to “Dreamers” who came to the United States as undocumented children. These views, Bush assures us, are “nonpartisan.” All Americans should agree about them, regardless of party.
It’s a strange contradiction—this political commentary that he won’t acknowledge as political. In the book’s acknowledgments, Bush explains that the series began in 2018, when his 2004 campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, visited him in Dallas and urged him to get involved in the immigration debate, “the tone and direction of which concerned us both deeply.” When Bush “reminded” Mehlman that he didn’t want to get involved in politics, Mehlman suggested that he paint portraits of immigrants to reflect his belief in the positive effects they have on the country.
But to make sure that his pro‑immigration paintings wouldn’t be taken as a political statement, Bush held off on showing them until after the 2020 election. This sort of ambivalence cuts through all his work as an artist. For Bush, painting is a way to say what he can’t say, to express feelings that include rejection, frustration, and anger, even as he abides by his official discipline of silence. One of the projects that Bush is working on now is a series on freedom fighters, which includes likenesses of Afghan women who resisted the Taliban. In the summer of 2025, there was another painting in his studio that wasn’t part of the series, according to someone who saw it: a big, ugly portrait of President Donald J. Trump. A spokesman for Bush declined to comment on its existence.
What would have happened if George W. Bush had said openly what he thought about Trump? Bush is famously resistant to considering his own psychology. Don’t put me on the couch, he says, when the topic turns to his inner life—repeating, with unwitting irony, something his father used to say. He has written multiple memoirs that manage to illuminate very little about his choices, convictions, or relationships. It’s as if he is determined to remain a mystery not just to others but to himself.
The political evolution of the Cheney family, so closely tied to the Bushes for a quarter century, provides a useful contrast. Dick Cheney supported Marco Rubio, not Jeb Bush, in the 2016 primaries. After Trump became the nominee, Cheney endorsed him, but without enthusiasm, staying away from the G.O.P. Convention that year. His eldest daughter, Liz, also held her nose and endorsed Trump. After she was elected to Congress as a representative for Wyoming, Liz supported, at the very least, Trump’s legislative agenda of tax cuts and of repealing the Affordable Care Act. She and her family abhorred Trump himself as much as George W. Bush did, but at that point they, too, were loath to tangle with him.
On January 6, 2021, that changed irrevocably. Liz Cheney, with the support of her father, broke with Trump, voting to impeach him for inciting the riot. While Bush agreed with her, he said so only in private. Following the House impeachment vote, he wrote to her, “Liz, courage is in short supply these days. Thank you for yours. You showed strong leadership and I’m not surprised. Lead on. 43.”
As a result of speaking out, Cheney found herself facing a choice—follow her conscience or preserve her career. She chose conscience, accepting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s invitation to serve on the House select committee on the January 6th attack. That role intensified her public opposition to Trump and deepened her party’s hostility to her. As Trump began to reassert himself after 2021, it was the Cheney family, not the Bushes, who became the public face of Republican resistance to authoritarianism.
Trump and his supporters were vicious and punitive. Liz Cheney was removed from G.O.P. leadership in May, 2021, and censured by the Wyoming G.O.P. In 2022, she faced a primary race against a Trump-backed challenger, Harriet Hageman, who defeated her by a thirty-seven‑point margin. Dick Cheney, reëmerging from relative public silence, denounced Trump as a “coward” in a campaign ad for his daughter. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence,” Cheney said. “A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big.” Cheney, whose advocacy for a powerful executive branch dated to his years working in the Ford White House, also had his own, principled idea of such power’s limits.
In 2024, both Liz and Dick Cheney, unlike George W. Bush, announced that they would vote for Kamala Harris. “In our nation’s 248‑year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Dick Cheney said in a prepared statement. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”
In a live interview, the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson asked Trump how he felt watching “Dick Cheney’s repulsive little daughter” campaign against him alongside Harris. Trump suggested that Cheney should be prosecuted by a military tribunal or perhaps shot. “Look, she’s a deranged person,” Trump said. “But the reason she couldn’t stand me is that she always wanted to go to war with people. I don’t want to go to war. She’s a radical war hawk. Let’s put her with a rifle standing there, with nine barrels shooting at her, O.K.? Let’s see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face.”
Liz Cheney’s career in the Republican Party was effectively over. If she’s ever elected again, it will be as a member of a different party, or after the G.O.P. has radically repudiated the MAGA movement—something that is hard to imagine at present. Her father left office even more discredited and unpopular than did George W. Bush, owing to his role in the use of torture and his perceived responsibility for the Iraq War. In 2007, Dick Cheney’s approval rating was thirteen per cent, by far the lowest ever recorded for a Vice-President. The response to his death, in 2025, showed that liberals still loathed him, and that most Republicans did, too. But the people who stand up to authoritarianism often aren’t those we expect or otherwise admire.
At a moment when conservative institutions were teetering and dissent was becoming politically suicidal, Bush retained moral authority in the minds of many lifelong Republicans. For twenty-five years, conservative commentators have continued to praise his calm and resolve following the September 11th attacks, his projection of national unity, and, less frequently, his refusal to scapegoat Muslim Americans. Bush needed only to do what he claimed to take pride in doing: speaking plainly. This man is unfit, he might have said. Instead, he stood at his easel as the tradition of moderation embodied by his family gave way to grievance, paranoia, and autocracy.
Bush coming out against Trump could have made a difference at many points. It likely would have mattered in the fall of 2016, by which point his post-Presidential approval rating had risen above fifty per cent with all voters. If Bush had endorsed Hillary Clinton, it might have encouraged members of his own party to vote for a responsible Democrat, however disliked, over a malignant Republican. The same was true again in 2024, when Bush could have joined the Cheneys in endorsing Kamala Harris as a far lesser evil. But, by then, Bush’s show of staying above the fray had hardened into a fixed posture. He hadn’t criticized Trump before, and he wasn’t going to now. This post‑Presidential abdication stands as the final, damning failure of the Bush Presidency. A leader who framed politics around a straightforward, Christian morality of right and wrong saw evil and failed to call it out.
Even when Trump came for PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Bush kept mum. Launched in 2003, PEPFAR became the largest commitment by any nation to address a single disease, and one of the most successful global-health initiatives of all time. According to one widely cited estimate, it has saved twenty‑five million lives. Even those on the left who condemned Bush’s Presidency often stipulated that PEPFAR, which embodied his concept of compassionate conservatism, was an important exception. To Bush’s right, the Trump sympathizers of Project 2025 described it as “America’s most successful aid program.”
Trump came after PEPFAR on his first day back in office. On January 20, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14155, withdrawing from the World Health Organization, and Executive Order 14169, freezing foreign aid, including PEPFAR. After Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency destroyed the U.S. Agency for International Development, the primary steward of American health assistance abroad, uncertainty hovered over what remained of the program. According to Brooke Nichols, a professor of global health at Boston University who specializes in the mathematical modelling of infectious diseases, cuts to PEPFAR cost more than a hundred and seventy-five thousand lives within a year—nearly a quarter of the approximately seven hundred and eighty thousand deaths caused by Trump’s foreign-aid cutbacks as a whole.
Here, surely, finally, was a moment for Bush to respond. But he did not speak out publicly against the cuts. In June, 2025, alongside notables such as Obama and Bono, he participated in a farewell videoconference for staff members at U.S.A.I.D. who were being fired. “Is it in our national interests that twenty‑five million people who would have died now live?” Bush asked. “I think it is, and so do you.” And yet Bush wouldn’t name the man ending the program or give permission for the video to be released publicly. Trump was burning his house down, and all Bush could bring himself to say was that it was a shame to see it destroyed. Perhaps he will paint portraits of some of the victims. ♦
This is drawn from “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era.”